Missouri's Child Welfare Agency Is Dangerously Understaffed

Long in the Making


The strain on staff has been long in the making.

Over the last two decades, the number of full-time personnel at DSS shrunk by a third. In fiscal year 2003, there were over 9,000 employees at DSS.

Today, there are fewer than 6,000.

In the Children’s Division, there are 558 fewer full-time staff as of Aug. 31 than there were in July 2009, a reduction of almost 25 percent. In its highest ranks, the last decade has seen nine different Children’s Division directors. Missey is the sixth director of the division under Govenor Mike Parson.

A 2003 study of Missouri by the National Coalition for Child Protective Reform diagnosed the system as “so overwhelmed with children who don’t need to be in it, that workers do not have the time to find all the children who do.”

By 2014, the state had created a recruitment and retention initiative which eventually resulted in “hiring blitzes” to conduct on-the-spot hiring and expanding acceptable degree types for hiring. Shelly Stillman worked at Children’s Division in St. Charles County, starting in 2006, first as a caseworker and then a Children’s Service specialist for three years training new workers.

For most of her time with the department, Stillman investigated abuse and neglect allegations that came in through the state hotline.
Stillman said she typically received up to 35 new reports a week on top of the reports already piling up on her desk. When state-level supervisors complained about the backlog, she wondered why they didn’t realize “this job is impossible.”

She recalls working long nights when she was eight months pregnant with her second child, “and you’re getting paid $35,000.”  Over the three years she worked as a trainer for the agency, she trained 55 workers.

“When I left,” she said, “three were [still] there.”

Most, she said, didn’t make it over four months. Such frequent turnover meant many workers lacked the experience necessary to, for instance, properly discern abuse-inflicted injuries, she said. That knowledge could take years to build.

She left in 2019 to work as a counselor for a private company. After 11 years with the Children’s Division, her salary only reached $39,000.

Samantha Lame joined the Children’s Division in March 2014 and left four years later. She spent time working on both foster care and investigations.

In alternative care, “I think I had up to 35 cases at one point in time,” she said, “which was just extremely unmanageable. Because you’re talking about 30, 35 kids where you have to do monthly visits, plus their parents, and on top of that, court hearings.”

The work was rewarding, she said, especially when parents succeeded and got to reunite with their children, or when adoption cases were finalized.

“That was a driving force,” she said.

But it wasn’t enough to stay.

She left the state in 2018 to work for a community health center. The hours were shorter, and she got “almost a $15,000 [pay] increase.”